Tech editor, designer and knitter.
Derbyshire
Joined November 2010
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Michelle Hazell retweeted
The feast of St. John Paul II is celebrated on October 22 because it marks the anniversary of the inauguration of his pontificate in 1978.
On October 22, 1978, he celebrated the Mass inaugurating his ministry as Pope, delivering his famous appeal to the world:
“Be not afraid! Open wide the doors for Christ!”
He was elected Pope on October 16, 1978, but the Church chose October 22 as his liturgical memorial to commemorate the beginning of his papal ministry.
St. John Paul II was canonized by Pope Francis on April 27, 2014, Divine Mercy Sunday.
🙏 October 22 is therefore a day to remember his extraordinary pontificate and his call to the world to open its heart to Christ.
Michelle Hazell retweeted
I’M GOING ON TOUR! 🎙️🎶
I’m absolutely thrilled to announce THE GOLDEN AGE OF SWING, coming to theatres across the UK in 2027!
I'll be joined by my fantastic live band for a celebration of some of the greatest songs ever written.
🎟️ TICKETS ON SALE NOW!
Good to see this place is still going, a boyfriend took me there once in the 1990s and it was literally just us two and the projectionist! No ice lollies then either.
Michelle Hazell retweeted
I'm going through a massively intense period of missing the country I grew up in, and the London of the 80s and 90s. This year has been hard, this summer particularly so. I just miss my home so much. It's such a headfuck, living through all this. People my age understand, I think
Michelle Hazell retweeted
In 1921, when my father was born in North Denes Road, Great Yarmouth, the road WAS the seafront, with nothing but dunes and beach between his road and the sea.
During the 1920s a new sea wall and reclamation pushed the coastline eastwards. We often think of the Norfolk coast as being lost to erosion but parts of it are growing too. Here, within my father’s lifetime, hundreds of metres of land appeared between his childhood home and the sea. #GreatYarmouth #Norfolk #AerialPhotography
Michelle Hazell retweeted
Crisp dust! The most sacred of seasonings, now available in its purest form. Find it in @bmstores and @Morrisons.
📷 instagram.com/new_in_ni
Exactly this.
I'm trying to think of examples of immediate threats to my life which a Whitehall bureaucrat would know more about than me. An incoming nuclear strike, perhaps? Incoming meteor? A tsunami? An earthquake? Deadly virus on the loose? A biological weapon strike?
In the event of an incoming nuclear or meteor strike, I'm not sure I'd want to know, and there's not much I could do even if I did.
Tsunamis are mercifully rare in the UK. Earthquakes, well serious ones, similarly, and I'd still probably know about it ahead of Whitehall.
Deadly virus on the loose? Well in 2020 they massively exaggerated the lethality of a virus which was apparently created in a Chinese lab with American funding, so they're probably not a great source of truth there.
A biological weapon strike? Well, the government launched one on us in December 2020 but still haven't 'fessed up to it yet, so I'm not sure the government is a trustworthy news source on this front either.
So... I think I'm happy to turn off government emergency alerts and continue to rely on my grade 1 human eyeballs...
As I said previously, the only emergencies the government might know about before me are probably the ones they themselves caused (and that's why they know so much about them).
Michelle Hazell retweeted
From a locked account - ‘Thinking that sending a push alert to people’s phones will deter wannabe arsonists is the kind of spectacularly stupid thing that could only come out of our civil service’
I remember this so clearly. We were on leave in the UK at the time and it was the first I'd heard of the Falklands War because it hadn't been big news in Kenya. Sparked a life-long interest in the conflict, the islands and Vulcan bombers!
Yesterday in 1982, SS Canberra returned to Southampton from service in the Falklands War with a rapturous reception.
This extraordinary footage shows Canberra's return greeted by thousands of people and a stirring rendition of 'Rule, Britannia!' 🇫🇰🇬🇧
#Falklands44
Michelle Hazell retweeted
For those who miss the 'best before' (BB) dates on perishables...
They still put them on, but they try to make it look like a code.
The grapes on the left were BB 29th June (F for the 6th month).
The grapes on the right were BB 7th July (G for the 7th month).
You're welcome😉
Michelle Hazell retweeted
The Undertaker Who Abolished the Telephone Operator
Almon Brown Strowger ran an undertaking business in Kansas City, Missouri, sometime around 1889. His competitor's wife was the local telephone operator. Every time a Kansas City resident called for an undertaker, she routed them to her husband. Strowger found out after reading in a newspaper that a close friend's funeral had gone to the competition.
He didn't sue. He didn't write letters. He went home and invented an automatic telephone exchange, a machine that connected callers to any line they selected, without a human operator touching it. The patent was filed on March 12, 1889. The first live Strowger exchange opened in LaPorte, Indiana, on November 3, 1892, serving 75 subscribers. It worked.
Within two decades, "Strowger switches" were routing calls on every continent. The fundamental stepping-switch principle he invented remained the backbone of global telephone networks well into the 1980s. The rotary dial telephone, the icon of the 20th century, was the direct commercial descendent of the device a furious undertaker built on his kitchen table to remove a single dishonest operator from his call chain.
He sold his patents in 1896 for $1,800. His stake in the company went for $10,000 two years later. The Bell System purchased those same patents in 1916 for $2.5 million. Strowger was already dead, he died in St. Petersburg, Florida, on May 26, 1902, aged 63, having collected almost none of the value he created.
The invention that automated a trillion telephone calls, dismantled an entire labor category, and laid the switching architecture of the modern world began because one man was losing funerals to a neighbor and refused to accept it.
He lost a body to a competitor. He gave everyone else a dial tone. The math was deeply unequal.
Michelle Hazell retweeted
3D Stereoscopic film - The rocks at Kynance Cove in Cornwall, waves rolling in at sunset
youtu.be/r5zykNuTQqI
This! My family think I'm crazy but it was all the cooling there was when I was little. Only trouble is, hot dry weather still feels like Christmas time to me...
🥵Old Africa Hand tip. Take face flannel or small hand towel. Put under cold tap. Wring out slightly. Drape cold wet twisted flannel around back of neck over shoulders. When it dries out or gets warm put under cold tap, rinse and repeat. If out and about find a tap somewhere. Comfort over glamour. Works at home, on the commute, at work, in school, before sleep. @TimesRadio
Michelle Hazell retweeted
Oak trees have evolved a smart way to overwhelm the animals that eat acorns.
Every few years, across hundreds of miles, they drop a massive number of acorns all at once. The year before, almost nothing. The year after, almost nothing again.
It's called masting, and the strategy is brilliant. Squirrels, deer, blue jays, turkeys, and bears all eat acorns. If oaks produced a steady crop every year, the animals would maintain populations sized exactly to eat most of it. By producing almost nothing for several years and then flooding the forest floor all at once, the trees overwhelm the predators.
There are simply too many acorns for the animals to eat, and the surplus germinates into the next generation of oak trees. The ones that hoard and forget, squirrels especially, become inadvertent planters.
What's harder to explain is the synchrony. How do oaks across 700 kilometers coordinate the same decision in the same year?
The leading explanations involve shared weather cues, a specific temperature pattern in spring that acts as a trigger across the whole region, and possibly pollen coupling, where trees that need pollen from other trees synchronize flowering and, by extension, fruiting. Chemical signaling through the air or soil is a third hypothesis still being investigated.
None of these fully accounts for the scale. The trees aren't talking in any way we can intercept and understand. They're responding to the same world and arriving at the same answer, simultaneously, across a landscape larger than most countries.
Michelle Hazell retweeted
19 seconds in Southport laying a wreath, no tears.
No tears for British farmers who committed suicide.
No tears for pensioners.
No tears for betrayed British veterans.
No tears for the victims of illegal migration.
No tears for Henry Nowak.
Tears for himself only.
Once upon a time, some of these would have been resigning matters ON THEIR OWN. When you see so many serious issues set out like this it's utterly appalling.
STARMER'S LIST OF SHAME:
He's about to resign but don't feel sorry for him... just read this.
(in no particular order)
Ignoring Rhianna's mum (her daughter stabbed 20+ times by invader)
King's speech containing policies *nobody voted for*
£200K a month on foreign trips (45 in 22 months/never here)
Biggest electoral wipeout in history
Factories closing due to Net Zero insanity
Bizarrely, bringing previous Labour failures back (Brown/Harman)
Attempted to cancel local elections (knew they would be hammered)
*Bringing previous Labour failures back (Brown/Harman)*
£1bn “reset with EU” when they sell us £100bn more than we sell them
Whipped MPs to become accomplices in his cover-up
£660m to French to do nothing
Undisclosed Palantir meeting with Mandelson
Constantly fibbing to the house
Shoplifting free-for-all (Greggs hiding sandwiches)
Buying votes lifting 2-child benefit cap (90% Muslim)
Freezing pensioners as they don't vote Labour
Employers NI hike/con trick
Letting 438 prisoners out by error
Lied about Durham party (COVID)
McSweeney's convenient mobile phone theft
Flippant "To us, he's just Peter" comment
Ricky Jones cleared after incitement
Imprisoned a mother for a tweet
Sue Gray debacle
Lord Alli buying his wife's clothes
Appointing Hermer/Powell without security clearance
Private schools closing due to VAT attack
Rayner tax fiddling probe
COVID broadcast from Lord Alli's flat (weird)
Most expensive electricity in world
Killing babies/abortion law
Damage USA relationship/idiotic ban on use of bases
Assisted suicide (pensioners don’t vote Labour)
100,000 extra in state schools from independents
Reeves blubbing in commons
Frightening Open AI £34bn investment off
Cabinet £22k Taylor Swift tickets
Reeves rental breach
Labour together - smearing journalists
Donors fast-tracked to jobs
Nick Brown see no evil hear no evil
Labour MP cavorting with TWO sub captains
Reynolds, the fake solicitor
Louise "fingers" Haigh, the mobile thief
Halting North Sea oil licenses (£17bn lost)
Dan Norris, rape charges
Killing off hospitality/pubs
Shovelling £billions to Ukraine (not in NATO)
Secret republican/anti-monarchist
Halting Chagossian food supplies (boats he will stop)
Lammy taxi-ride lies/leaving trash
£22bn "black hole" lie
Tulip Siddiq on run from Interpol
Mystery £750K donor
Andrew Gwynne, "pensioner die" rant
Cut frigates order from 13 to 8
Homeless minister evicting tenants
Needed a court to tell him what a woman is
Reeves lying on CV
Mike Amesbury punching voters
Benefits exceeding income tax (£330bn)
Killing farmers with IHT
300,000 more unemployed
Caplin, Grindr abuse of minor
CCP spy embassy
Chagos scam/treason (Mandelson?)
IRGC not proscribed
Treating pension costs as defence %
Southport 'far-right' disgraceful comments
Recognising Palestine terrorist state
67,000 channel invaders
Muslim two-tier justice
Removing jury trials
Lawfare on NI veterans (for free!)
No navy in middle east
Faking military spending/dragging feet
Strange Czech work camp as young man
Very odd firebombing male models
Nobbling CCP spy case
Islamophobia law
Degraded Gibraltar sovereignty to EU
Removing "HM" from Govt comms
Economy flatlining
Exports crashing
Commie breakfast clubs (buying votes)
Highest tax % ever
£120bn fiscal deficit even after raising taxes
Highest gilts costs of any G7
£500m for pointless Erasmus
Given away fishing rights again to French
Watering down MP responsibilities
Ignored antisemites marching each week
Left scene after cyclist collision (drunk/lie about tailor?)
Voice coach during COVID (breaching mixing rules)
Island of Strangers speech that he denied all knowledge off
Strange un-minuted meetings with Bill Gates/Blackrock
"I'd rather be in Davos, than Westminster" (true colours)
@UKLabour #Starmergeddon
